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Past Is Another Resource: Remembering the 70Th Anniversary of the Victory Day on Livejournal

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Nationalities Papers (2021), 49: 2, 375–388 doi:10.1017/nps.2019.64 ARTICLE Past Is Another Resource: Remembering the 70th Anniversary of the Victory Day on LiveJournal Mykola Makhortykh,1* Yehor Lyebyedyev,2 and Daniel Kravtsov3 1Department of Slavonic Studies and Cultures, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2Newfire Partners, Lviv, Ukraine, and 3RTB-Media, San Francisco, California, USA *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] Abstract In our article we examine changes experienced by media and memory systems in Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. Using as an example a popular Russian blogging platform, LiveJournal, we scrutinize how the digital practices related to commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany are influenced by the growing instrumentalization of Second World War memory for media propaganda and manipulation. Using topic modeling to analyze a large set of data on Russian users’ interactions with the platform, we examine how hegemonic and alternative interpretations of the Second World War interact on LiveJournal and how their interactions are influenced by the growing antagonism between Russia and the West. Our findings suggest that LiveJournal constitutes a fractured memory system, which is characterized by uneven representation of Second World War experiences and the growing influence of pro-government actors promoting hegemonic war narratives. However, our observations also show that instrumentalization of the past in the context of the Ukraine crisis does not necessarily interfere with digital practices of Second World War commemoration with the latter remaining unaffected by the events in Ukraine. Keywords: digital media; memory; propaganda; Second World War; Russia Introduction The Ukraine crisis, which started in 2013 with anti-government protests in Kyiv, followed by the ousting of pro-Russian President Yanukovych and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, has signified a profound change in the Russian media landscape. The development of the crisis, in particular the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian insurgents, led to the rise of nationalist propaganda and anti-Western rhetoric in the Russian public sphere. Together with the unprecedented level of state-sponsored cynicism toward the democratic role of mass media (Roudakova 2017), these transformations have led to increased instrumentalization and militarization of traditional and online media in Russia. Under these circumstances, the line between predominantly state-controlled mainstream media outlets and “more independent, international, and oppositional” (Etling et al. 2010) online platforms in the post-2014 period became a blurry one. Both analogue and digital media turned to be susceptible to propaganda and manipulation by pro- and anti-Kremlin actors and, instead of providing more nuanced views on domestic and international affairs, online outlets became fertile grounds for producing fake news and nurturing polarized views (Makhortykh and Lyebyedyev 2015; Gruzd and Tsyganova 2015; Zhdanova and Orlova 2017). © Association for the Study of Nationalities 2020. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 30 Sep 2021 at 19:38:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 376 Mykola Makhortykh et al. In this article, we discuss the impact of these changes on the media and memory landscape in Russia by examining interactions between cultural memory of the Second World War and the Russian blogosphere after 2014. A number of works (Zvereva 2011; Rutten, Fedor, and Zvereva 2013; Gaufman 2015; Bernstein 2016) note particular interconnectedness between processes of cultural remembrance and media digitalization in Russia, where online spaces form “a pivotal discursive territory” (Rutten and Zvereva 2013, 2) for interacting with the region’s turbulent past and present. For this reason, the instrumental (ab)uses of the Russian media landscape in the course of the Ukraine crisis often involve appropriation of traumatic memories of past conflicts which serve as integral modulators for discursive construction of (in)security in the region (Gaufman 2015, 2017; Makhortykh 2018). By using a cultural remembrance lens to scrutinize changes in the Russian media landscape, we investigate the influence of these alterations on mnemonic functions of the regional media and explore dynamic interactions between changing media and memory systems in Russia. In order to fulfill these goals, we examine digital activity on the major Russian blogosphere platform, LiveJournal, around the 2015 Victory Day, which marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Our choice of LiveJournal as a case platform is attributed for three major reasons. First, during the period of study, LiveJournal constituted the largest blogging service in Russia as well as the fourth most popular social media platform among Russian users (Frolova 2015). Second, LiveJournal is characterized by a distinct set of communicative practices which distinguish it from other social networking sites like Vkontakte or Facebook (Kuntsman 2010; Kulyk 2013) and have significant impact on the way the past is narrated (Trubina 2010; Abramov 2011; Kukulin 2013), Third, LiveJournal is recognized as an important platform for political communication in Russia (Etling et al. 2010; Asmolov 2012; Kluyeva 2016) that is used both by pro-government and opposition actors to advance their political agendas. The Victory Day is a central element of cultural remembrance of the Second World War in the post-socialist space (Gudkov 2005; Trubina 2010; Bernstein 2016). For this reason, the jubilee event in 2015 attracted significant coverage both in traditional and online media, which also used this occasion to reinforce their representation and interpretation of the Ukraine crisis. Using a large set of digital data collected from LiveJournal, we discuss the following questions: How was the jubilee of Soviet victory discussed on digital media and in which ways were these discussions affected by evolving memory regimes in the region? How did hegemonic and alternative interpretations of the Second World War interact on LiveJournal and in which ways were these interpretations influenced by the growing antagonism between the West and Russia? And, finally, what are the implications of the ongoing transformations of regional media landscape for war remembrance in Russia? To answer these questions, we start by scrutinizing the changes experienced by media and memory systems in Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis; while doing so, we specifically examine the role of LiveJournal in the context of political communication and cultural remembrance in the region. Following the examination of the platform’s role in the above-mentioned contexts, we present our methodological approach and describe how we used topic modeling techniques to process and analyze the large set of Victory Day-related content from LiveJournal. Then, we discuss our findings, starting with general patterns of representing the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory on Live- Journal, followed by the investigation of its use by pro- and anti-Kremlin actors in the context of the Ukraine crisis. We conclude by discussing the impact of the growing instrumentalization of digital media in the context of the Ukraine crisis on the memory and media systems in Russia. Russian Blogosphere as Part of a Changing Media System The Russian blogosphere is constituted by a vast collection of digital platforms which originate both in Russia (e.g., Diary.ru) and outside of it (e.g., Twitter). These platforms host communities of Russophone users who run individual and collective blogs; the purposes of these blogs vary from personal diaries to news feeds and from thematic communities to advertisement groups. The Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 30 Sep 2021 at 19:38:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. Nationalities Papers 377 functions of the Russian blogosphere are not limited to entertainment only: in the context of the Russian public sphere, where ordinary citizens often have limited capabilities to shape public agendas, it also serves as a major outlet for social and cultural self-expression (Kukulin 2013, 112). In this way, the Russian blogosphere allows internet users to participate in the discussion of current political developments, including the Ukraine crisis (Suslov 2014), and share their opinions on the matters of cultural remembrance such as Second World War commemoration in Russia (Trubina 2010). In this article, we examine changes in the Russian blogosphere by focusing on the LiveJournal platform, which is an integral component of its ecosystem. LiveJournal is a popular blogging service which was established in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick. Soon after its establishment, LiveJournal became popular among Russophone users and in the following years turned into the most popular blogging platform in Russia (Yandex 2006). In 2007, LiveJournal was acquired by the Russian company, SUP Media, and in 2016 the platform’s US-based servers were relocated to Russia. In 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to comply with the
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